Since nine months is long enough to grow an infant, I figured that it was also long enough to make a decision on a radio show, so I up and called the Program Manager at PRI this morning. I called a little after ten, Eastern Time, which would be about nine her time. I got the voicemail, which indicated only that she was either on the phone or away from her desk, so I left a friendly message asking for any update. It is now pushing one, and no return call so far.
Now, in recent months, and no more frequently than once every two months, I have e-mailed her to try to get an update or to inform her of developments such as the Next in the Series website and this blog. In July, I sent a plain, old-fashioned letter with a self-addressed, stamped envelope asking for information. Nothing.
Now, today, it seems, I am getting nothing again.
It is one thing to get rejected. It is quite another to get ignored. I am considering my options, which include formally withdrawing my submission so that I can submit it to NPR. (I have their submissions guidelines bookmarked, just in case.)
And I thought people in Minnesota were supposed to be nice.
5 comments:
Okay. So, I had to look up that Canto on the Web because I’ve never read Pound. Not just because he was an anti-Semite lunatic, but because I’ve always heard he’s hard. Gave Eliot notes. And I don’t mean mash notes, either.
However, he makes a good and true point in that Canto. And it keeps getting worse. There is a balance that an artist must make in order to pay the bills. The problem comes when the raising of the cash supersedes the needs of the work. This is the whole problem that Orson Welles had. Make the Paul Masson commercial, shoot a few feet of film. Do the voiceover for canned peas, shoot a few more feet. An artist of that caliber shouldn’t have to beg a crust of bread just to expose some film. On the other hand, I’m a little leery about state-sponsored funding for artists because “who pays the piper calls the tune.” I think we see this problem playing out at NPR, where editorial policy has appreciably changed over the last 20 years because they need the Government funding the way that a heroin addict needs a fix or an alcoholic a drink.
It’s like the scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which Sheldon Leonard and friends make Old Man Gower grovel for a nickel for a beer. You notice that funding for The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Endowments for both the Arts and Humanities have not disappeared or been appreciably cut despite the Republican interregnum in which we now live. That’s because the Neocons understand money and its uses.
I think that the decisions at PRI are made by career Arts administrators, bureaucrats with soft-and-fuzzy degrees. It’s certainly possible that creative people are involved, though, and radio itself is a strange little world unto itself. On the one hand, I worry that my proposal wasn’t pompous enough. And I don’t have any letters after my name and no history in radio other than a couple of decades of people telling me that I should get into it because of my voice.
On the other hand, I forget what I was going to say.
I hate to pull it because then I’d just have to start all over someplace else. And every day has to bring me a day closer to hearing, right?
Fair enough.
I am not a very accomplished reader of poetry, nor a very subtle one, unfortunately. And I have a tendency to pop off about things, which has its limitations. Those two things being said, I really found the usury poem to be generally an appeal to tread lightly on the path of capitalism. A “the pursuit of money is the root of all evil” kind of thing. As an artist (good or bad is not my place to say), I just jumped off from my own thoughts and experiences and concerns.
I will be reading more Pound, by the way. I’ve enjoyed both the Cantos and found him less obscure than I’d been led to believe. I should’ve known, though. I read Eliot, quite by accident, back when I was 18 and enjoyed him thoroughly.
The relationship of the artist to money is a subject of interest to me, though, particularly in this era in which anyone who makes money is seen as selling out or not having been genuine as an artist, a viewpoint which I see as being a bunch of hokum. But again, this is me just popping off. Old habits die hard.
Just by the way, I posted something on the "Another Novel Approach" thread that I don't think you've seen.
Thanks for the advice. It's solid. And ol' Chuang and I haven't had a chance to commisserate in some time. We're due.
It's true that usuary has found its way into pretty much every culture that came up with the idea of property and owning stuff. I guess the difference is that it is the central idea of modern capitalism.
Dylan has such a gift for packing tons of meaning into a small number of words. I mean, that line kind of takes me on a trip from John Dillinger ("The National Bank") to the guy sitting in the next cubicle ("the college").
I hate the way that the capitalist machine chews people up and spits them out, but I'm no utopian. I suspect that once people get past the tribal level that we're pretty much screwed, so what can you do? I am open to suggestions, though.
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